Abstract
As the TV documentary voiceover proclaims, it was at the same life juncture that Oscar Wilde found public acclaim for his work and was publically vilified for private acts with men. In this classically Icarian plot, Wilde ascends to the heavens on the strength of his words, then, fatally, crashes to earth by dint of the weakness of—or of his weakness for—the body. As I argue, by way of Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, accounts of his trials, and a dramatization of those trials in our time, it is only by reconciling this ideational split—which long predates the “Arts & Entertainment” version of it—that we may reach understanding of the novel, the trials, and why the very notion of Wilde provoked the reactions it did.
Oscar Wilde was the most celebrated playwright of his day. But his notorious escapades scandalized Victorian Britain and brought him to ruin. With lacerating wit Oscar Wilde’s plays skewered staid Victorian society and won him fame and fortune, but his not-so-secret private life was another matter entirely. At a time when homosexuality was a criminal offense, Oscar Wilde tempted fate by living openly as a gay man. His refusal to conceal his activities led to a fall from grace that was swift and precipitous. In the end, Oscar Wilde lost everything—except his sense of humor.
—“Oscar Wilde,” A&E-TV Biography series1
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Notes
Arthur Ransome, Oscar Wilde: A Critical Study (New York: Mitchell Kennerly, 1912), 205, 213.
See Leslie J. Moran, “Transcripts and Truth: Writing the Trials of Oscar Wilde,” in Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend, ed. Joseph Bristow (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009), 234–58.
H. Montgomery Hyde, The Trials of Oscar Wilde (London: William Hodge, 1948), 13.
Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Vintage, 1988), vi-vii.
Melissa Knox, Oscar Wilde: A Long and Lovely Suicide (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 1994.
Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (New York: Verso, 1995), 326.
See Eagleton, “The Doubleness of Oscar Wilde,” The Wildean: A Journal of Oscar Wilde Studies 9 (2001): 2–9.
Joseph Bristow, Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing after 1885 (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995), 21.
See Margaret Stetz, “Oscar Wilde at the Movies: British Sexual Politics and The Green Carnation (1960),” Biography 23, no. 1 (2000): 90–107.
Oliver S. Buckton, “Oscar Goes to Hollywood: Wilde, Sexuality, and the Gaze of Contemporary Cinema,” in Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend, ed. Joseph Bristow (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009), 305–38.
Oscar Wilde, Complete Short Fiction, edited by Ian Small (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), front matter.
Bristow, “Biographies: Oscar Wilde—the Man, the Life, the Legend,” in Oscar Wilde Studies, ed. Frederick S. Roden (Houndmills, Basingstoke, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 6.
Bristow, introduction to Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 4.
Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 18–19.
Stephen Arata, Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 65.
Jeff Nunokawa, “The Disappearance of the Homosexual in The Picture of Dorian Gray,” in Professions of Desire: Lesbian and Gay Studies in Literature, ed. George E. Haggerty and Bonnie Zimmerman (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1995), 183.
Quoted in Karl Beckson, Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage (London and New York: Routledge, 1970), 8.
Quoted in John Sloan, Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 95.
Adam Parkes, Modernism and the Theater of Censorship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 9.
Ian Small, introduction to Complete Short Fiction, by Oscar Wilde, ed. Ian Small (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), xi.
Frederick S. Roden, Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture (Houndmills, Basingstoke, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 136.
Nunokawa, Tame Passions of Wilde: The Styles of Manageable Desire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 41–42.
Wilde, Decorative Art in America (New York: Brentano’s, 1906), 96.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 151.
Nikolai Endres, “Locating Wilde in 2004 and the Fourth Century BCE: Platonic Love and Closet Eros in The Picture of Dorian Gray,” Irish Studies Review 13, no. 3 (2005), 304.
Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 61.
Richard A. Kaye, “Gay Studies/Queer Theory and Oscar Wilde,” in Oscar Wilde Studies, ed. Frederick S. Roden (Houndmills, Basingstoke, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 189–223.
Stanley Cavell, “Nothing Goes without Saying: The Marx Brothers’ Immigrant Talk,” in Talk Talk Talk: The Cultural Life of Everyday Conversation, ed. S. I. Salamensky (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 95–104.
Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 42.
Quoted in Michael Kane, “Insiders/Outsiders: Conrad’s The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ and Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Modern Language Review 92, no. 1 (1997), 1–21.
Linda Dowling, Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 175.
Quoted in Ed Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 169.
Cavell, Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), xi—xii.
Julia Kristeva, “Towards a Semiology of Paradigms,” The Tel Quel Reader, ed. Patrick French and Roland-François Lack (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 29.
Bristow, introduction to The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), xvi.
Douglas, Alfred, “The Dead Poet,” in Oscar Wilde: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Richard Ellmann (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 44.
Rachel Ablow, “Oscar Wilde’s Fictions of Belief,” Novel 42, no. 2 (2009), 179.
Pater, The Renaissance (New York: Oxford, 1987).
Bristow, “‘A Complex Multiform Creature’: Wilde’s Sexual Identities,” Victorian Literature and Culture 10 (1991): 156.
Quoted in William F. Shuter, “The ‘Outing’ of Walter Pater,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 48, no. 4 (1994): 481.
Quoted in Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Moment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 124.
Moe Meyer, “Under the Sign of Wilde,” in The Politics and Poetics of Camp, ed. Moe Meyer (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 92. In Meyer’s formulation, the term “posing” takes on an additional valence, as equivalent to serving in a passive role in sodomitical acts and coded as “perverse” (89), effeminate, and indicative of a shameful, broader subaltern sexual status, while the active role was coded as acceptably close to the heterosexual masculine norm.
Quoted in Merlin Holland, The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde (New York: Harper, 2003), 214.
See Michael S. Foldy, The Trials of Oscar Wilde: Deviance, Morality, and Late-Victorian Society (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997).
Quoted in David Haperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 27.
See Wilde, Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks, ed. Philip E. Smith and Michael S. Helfand (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
see also Julia Prewitt Brown, Cosmopolitan Criticism: Oscar Wilde’s Philosophy of Art (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997).
Wilde, The Artist as Critic, ed. Richard Ellmann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 290–320.
See Jarlath Killeen, The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde (London: Ashgate, 2007), 137.
Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions (New York: Brentano’s, 1916), 1:194–95.
See Lucy McDiarmid, “Oscar Wilde’s Speech from the Dock,” Textual Practice 15, no. 3 (2010): 447–66.
See Jonas Barish, The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985).
See, for instance, Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (London, New York: Routledge, 1993).
Moisés Kaufman, Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (New York: Grove, 1997), 7.
For more discussion of I Am My Own Wife, see Salamensky, “Review: I Am My Own Wife, by Doug Wright, directed by Moisés Kaufman, Theatre Journal 55, no. 4 (2003): 700–702.
Jill Dolan, Presence and Desire: Essays on Gender, Sexuality, and Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 172.
David Savran, Communists, Cowboys, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Works of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 76–110.
Anja Muller-Muth, “Writing ‘Wilde’: The Importance of Re-Presenting Oscar Wilde in Fin-de-Millénaire Drama in English,” in The Importance of Reinventing Oscar, ed. Uwe Böker, Richard Corballis, and Julie A. Hibbard (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2002), 219.
Stoppard, The Invention of Love (New York: Grove, 1998), 102.
Todd Haynes, Velvet Goldmine (Miramax Lionsgate, 1998).
Quoted in Peter Dickinson, “Oscar Wilde: Reading the Life after the Life,” Biography 28, no. 3 (2005), 227.
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© 2012 S. I. Salamensky
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Salamensky, S.I. (2012). Wilde Worlds. In: The Modern Art of Influence and the Spectacle of Oscar Wilde. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137011886_5
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